Denny's new breakfast will bowl you over

Denny's new Meat Lover's breakfast will bowl you over

Published 5:30 am, Thursday, July 28, 2005

This week I reached out for a new Meat Lover's Complete Bowl Breakfast, the biggest breakfast ever served at Denny's — where porking out is the minimum daily requirement — three times a day.

Here's the blueprint: a bed of two helpings of hash-brown potatoes, topped with two eggs (any way you want 'em), shredded Cheddar, crumbled sausage, crumbled bacon and diced ham — like I said, porking out.

Whoa, who said we're done? You also get a side order of two strips of bacon and two sausage links.

All those calories and fat grams don't include any butter or syrup for your pancakes. This breakfast is enough for two. And I don't mean two people. I'm talking two days.

When the waitress lugged over my Meat Lover's Complete Bowl Breakfast, I wondered whether I should use a fork or spoon ... or a shovel? I went with a soup spoon for the bowl and forked over the pancakes and side meats.

I love combining food in a bowl. One of my favorite meals of the year is the day after Thanksgiving. I take a big mixing bowl and toss in hunks of leftover turkey and mounds of stuffing and mashed potatoes. I cover the whole mess with gravy and pop it in the 'wave. Man, that's big eating.

Like a good architect, Denny's built the Meat Lover's Complete Breakfast Bowl with a solid foundation: hash browns. The potatoes soak up the egg, cheese and meat oozings. I gave the bowl a quick stir and dug in. The right call for eggs is scrambled. Sunny side up or over easy would be too drippy.

You might want to wrap the pancakes around the bacon and sausage, creating pigs in a blanket. Again, a time-tested, carny-approved combination of food.

Denny's, with 1,616 restaurants coast to coast, makes a terrific, reliable breakfast; we all know that. And this is just more, more and more. It's a breakfast buffet at your table.

Everything in the bowl tastes fantastic, and then you have a whole other breakfast waiting on the side. For $6.49, it's such a deal.

The Meat Lover's is just one of three new Complete Bowl breakfasts at Denny's. There's also the Ham & Mushroom Bowl and the Country Sausage Bowl.

If you think the Meat Lover's packs a lot of food, try the Country Sausage Bowl, which is the same basic blueprint, plus a dish of country gravy.

The Complete Bowls are part of Denny's "Abundant Value" menu, which includes an array of breakfasts, lunches and dinners that will have you running for those "fat pants" you still keep in the back of your closet just in case.

Just in case you went back to your old evil eating habits, which everybody knew you would. Denny's didn't help.